Lotusblog

Yesterday I had an enormous amount of grief trying to send emails. And that’s supposed to be the world’s easiest thing in the new information economy, right?
Every single message I sent came back several minutes later telling me that since my mail server had been blacklisted (for spam) and that all emails from me were being rejected.
This sort of thing has happened before. From my limited understanding of the issue, a computer on the same network (this is probably the wrong word, so if you can correct me, please do) was sending spam. The reaction of every other mail server on the internet, then, was to blacklist the server I was using it, and reject email from said server for 24 hours (during which time the spammer would have given up and moved on).

The outcome of all these shenanigans can be summed up as follows:
1. Spam still gets sent. It always does.
2. Innocent users get inconvenienced.
3. I get really angry and write a pointless blog post about it.

So please, if you happen to meet a spammer, please politely ask them to refrain from their nefarious deeds.